I recently got an email and I figured I might as well share it.   It relates to this posting:
Panic and madness in a radiophobic world

Subject: Blog posting March 18th

My name is Emily Peck. I am writing to you in reference to a blog posting from March 18th called “Panic and madness in a radiophobic world” in which you unfairly judge me based on one article you read. If living 4 kilometres from 6 nuclear reactors during a 9 earthquake causes me to panic or be worried does that make me an attention seeker? Does being upset about losing all my possesions including my car make me an attention seeker? Does me using the media to help raise $70,000 for my community in Japan and not a cent for myself make me an attention seeker?

You cannot possibly understand what we went through on March 11 and the days after. If you were standing for 6 hours outdoors 4kms from 3 reactors approaching meltdown would you not get checked out at the hospital? I suppose the post traumatic stress myself and the residents of my town must be attention seeking too?

I have returned to Japan and am living as a nuclear refugee in the hotels with the other refugees as we cannot return home and we possibly never can. I am eating Fukushima produce and drinking the water. I still live in Fukushima with my community but live in a different location. I returned to Japan to cheer up the children who have had such a terrible time and I work with them everyday at their school but I suppose that makes me an attention seeker too?

I am asking you very nicely to please remove that blog entry – not the whole thing just the unfair, nasty comments about me and that article. If you have a heart, I am sure you will as my friends in Japan and I have been through enough without having unfair judgements cast upon our fear of the nuclear power plant and what might happen next. My friend pointed me in the direction of this blog and I kind of wish he didnt due to the angst it has caused me, so please consider my request.

Thanking you in anticipation
Emily Peck

My response:

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The press has been going nuts the past few hours with stories of “weapons grade uranium” or “highly enriched uranium” being for sale on the black market in Moldova.   A group of men have apparently been arrested for selling what they claim was enriched uranium, with some reports indicating that they were selling it as nuclear bomb material.

The reported amounts were relatively small, not nearly enough to actually build a nuclear weapon.  Even if they had been highly enriched uranium of a quantity necessary, it would still have taken knowledge and facilities beyond those of any non-state terror group to build a functional nuclear weapon.   Still, if this was highly enriched uranium, it’s still a very big deal.  For one thing, HEU is pretty damn valuable stuff, which is generally guarded quite closely if only for it’s value.  It’s used for many research and military nuclear reactors, but becomes too radioactive to easily transport after it has been in the reactor for even a short period of time.

While HEU is not easily fabricated into a weapon by most groups, even a small amount of it could really help a country like Iran or North Korea jump several months ahead in a nuclear weapons program, as production of HEU requires a great deal of enrichment. Even a small amount of highly enriched uranium could also be quite dangerous, as criticality accidents can easily occur with such material.

Here’s what the New York Times Says about the incident:

Arrests in Moldova Over Possible Uranium Smuggling
MOSCOW — The police in Moldova said Wednesday that they had arrested six people involved with a criminal group that said it was dealing in smuggled nuclear materials and was active in the former Soviet Union and in Arab countries.

The group had been negotiating the sale of uranium, police officials said in a statement and in remarks reported by news agencies, and the authorities suggested that the material had come from Russia.

Some of the suspects were arrested while they were carrying a lead canister, the authorities said. In a video released to the news media, police officers wearing gloves showed how a Geiger counter clicked rapidly when brought near the dull gray metal tube. The police said the contents of the tube would be sent for analysis.

Though associated with the chaos of the immediate years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reports of nuclear smuggling in the former Eastern bloc continue to this day, and are no less ominous for the number of false alarms that are raised from time to time. Last year, for example, the Moldovan authorities arrested members of a group that was selling what turned out to be only slightly radioactive uranium.

The prevalence of these cases, including frauds and other scams, illustrates the difficulties associated with the legacy of the loosely guarded Soviet weapons program.

The Moldovan authorities said that the suspects, who included four Moldovans, one Russian and one resident of the Russian-backed separatist region of Transnistria in eastern Moldova, had sought a buyer for what the suspects said was bomb-grade uranium, Western and Russian news agencies reported.

The gang thought it was negotiating with a North African buyer who turned out to be an undercover security agent, according to the police and the news agency reports. They gang’s members had sought to sell uranium that they said was enriched to an unspecified refinement of the isotope 235 for between $29 million and $144 million per kilogram, the police statement said.

Other press outlets are even less restrained, coming right out and saying that this was indeed weapons grade uranium intended for construction of a nuclear bomb.

But is this actually highly enriched, even weapons-grade uranium?

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It seems now Australia is in on the action, after South Korea, Russia and a few others stated that they would preform “tests for radiation” on major imports from Japan such as automobiles.
Via Fox News:

SYDNEY — A boatload of 800 cars arriving Down Under from Japan will be tested for radiation by Australia’s nuclear watchdog after other Japanese vehicles were found to be radioactive, The (Sydney) Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.

The move is the first Australian test of non-food exports from the fallout-ravaged Asian nation, and marks a turnaround in position for the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA).

Officials from ARPANSA will board the cargo ship Trans Future 7 when it docks at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, on Thursday, after picking up 700 Toyotas and 100 other cars from the Japanese port of Yokohama.

Thirty of those vehicles are used cars, which the maritime union fears could have been in areas affected by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that damaged nuclear reactors along the Japanese east coast.

The officials will use hand-held radiation detectors and will also take surface samples from spots where people in Japan could have touched the vehicles.

Previously, the agency had said such tests were unnecessary. However, after intense pressure from dock workers and the discovery in Chile of low levels of radioactivity in cars shipped from Yokohama, ARPANSA said it will conduct the tests to reassure stevedores.

The Maritime Union of Australia said the decision was a win for both workers and the general public.

Well, it sure seems clear to me that this is not just a case of dock workers who know nothing about radiation pressuring the government to do silly and unnecessary tests.

As such, I am offering my services in this area. If any radiation is detected anywhere near the vicinity of a brand new car, I will accept the responsibility for properly disposing of said vehicle. I will do so free of charge, except, of course, for the cost of shipping the car to me. Once I have received the car I can assure any party that sends it that it will not pose a radiological hazard to anyone.   It will be dealt with accordingly.

Please note: I am especially experienced in the radiological remediation and disposal of high end and luxury vehicles. It should be noted that vehicles which contain materials such as top grain leather or have large high-performance engines could pose a special challenge – one which I am more than willing to take on.

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What the hell are Greenpeace and similar groups going to be thinking about this?   It seems like they may have been hit by a genuine conflict that even their spineless leadership can’t slip around.

Via the Associated Press:

Traces of radiation found in 2 whales off Japan
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese whalers caught two animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation, presumably from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said Wednesday.

Two of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about one-twentieth of the legal limit, fisheries officials said.

They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant since it was hit by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

“The levels are far below the limit, and the meat from the catch is safe for consumption,” Fisheries Agency official Kosei Takekoshi said.

One of the minkes had a cesium reading of 31 becquerels per kilogram, and the other 24.3 becquerels, compared to the legal limit of 500 becquerels per kilogram for highly migratory marine products.

The 17 whales were caught off the shores of Kushiro city — a main coastal whaling hub — during an April 25-June 10 expedition.

The agency has not previously surveyed radiation in whales, so no comparison is available before and after the Fukushima crisis.

The government has banned fishing around the coastal nuclear plant. Local government and fisheries officials have been monitoring radiation in seafood along the coast weekly.

What must they be thinking??

“We hate whaling, because people like whales and it gives us good publicity to harass whalers. But whaling provides evidence of “radiation” and people are really scared of radiation. We hate nuclear power a real lot. Whaling is bad because whales are natural and cuddly. But whaling is good because it gives us more radiation headlines to scare people. But it kills whales. But the whales are radioactive so they don’t belong in the environment anyway. But it’s wrong to kill them. But it’s wrong to irradiate them. But doing so makes nuclear power look bad.

People should not eat this whale meat because it’s radioactive and they’ll die horrible deaths. But people who eat whale meat deserve to die horrible deaths anyway. But it’s wrong to kill the whales. But killing them stops them from dying a horrible extended death from cancer because of the radiation.

Whaling does not yield scientifically valid date. Except it does this time because the data can be used for our own propaganda.

Less whaling means we are winning. But less whaling means less opportunity to prove how nuclear power is killing the whales. But killing the whales won’t help. But they’re going to die from radiation.

Whales are natural. But radioactive whales are a danger to nature. But whaling is more human intervention. But human intervention is okay as long as it somehow hurts nuclear energy’s future.”

And by the way: One would expect some radioisotopes to be found in marine life as a result of the discharges from Fukushima. This is not unexpected. It’s also a trivial amount of radioactivity.

At least no more so than any other rabbit. Yes, it is made up of atoms, which include a nucleus. Yes, it does get its energy indirectly from the sun, which is nuclear. Yes, the elements that compose it were created in nuclear reactions in ancient stars. Yes, it is radioactive, due to potassium-40 and carbon-14.

(Direct link for those who can’t view embedded videos)

But other than that, there’s nothing “nuclear” about this rabbit.

A media frenzy followed the posting of the above video which was accompanied with the following description (translated to English):

After the incident, while the government was reporting there were no immediate health effects and evacuation was unnecessary, those of us in Namie weren’t being given any information about what was going on.

I thought I was going to be silenced in some cover-up between the national and prefectural governments. I was working outside at home when the #3 reactor exploded and my face and throat were scalded. I thought I was going to die at any moment.

I continued to feed my rabbits the grass from outside of my house, and sometime after the rabbit with no ears was born. It was the first deformity I have ever seen with my rabbits. Rabbits reproduce faster than humans, and so perhaps this is a vision of the children that will be born after this incident.

Why this doesn’t actually mean anything:
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Recently a story has been making the rounds about how the elderly in Japan (or at least some of them) are now are volunteering to help clean up the Fukushima nuclear plant. It’s the kind of story which tugs at the heartstrings, implying self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Via the BBC:

Japan pensioners volunteer to tackle nuclear crisis
The Skilled Veterans Corps, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of 60.

They say they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

It was while watching the television news that Yasuteru Yamada decided it was time for his generation to stand up.

No longer could he be just an observer of the struggle to stabilise the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The retired engineer is reporting back for duty at the age of 72, and he is organising a team of pensioners to go with him.

For weeks now Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends, sending out e-mails and even messages on Twitter.

Volunteering to take the place of younger workers at the power station is not brave, Mr Yamada says, but logical.

“I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live,” he says.

“Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer.”

Mr Yamada is lobbying the government hard for his volunteers to be allowed into the power station. The government has expressed gratitude for the offer but is cautious.

Certainly a couple of MPs are supporting Mr Yamada.

While there is some truth to the claim that older individuals are at less risk from ionizing radiation, due to the fact that there are fewer years left in their life for cancer to develop, I’m still going to say that this is a BAD idea. The danger to workers really is not radiation. Even the workers with the highest exposure have not gotten anywhere near the point of acute radiation poisoning and only increase their lifetime cancer risk by a trivial amount. At this point the reactors are stable and it’s highly unlikely that a major radiation-related accident will occur.

There are dangers, however. The one fatality to occur at Fukushima since the earthquake was a man in his 50’s who died of an apparent heart attack. That risk, along with the risk of general workplace accidents is much greater than the risk of radiation. The elderly are not suited for the kind of work that is needed. Long days, no air conditioning or creature comforts and heavy lifting are the kind of things that quickly will leave an elderly person fatigued or worse, cause a heart attack, stroke or other health problem. Worrying about these health issues and potentially having to treat those who succumb to the stresses or simply reach the point of exhaustion is likely to cause enough of a problem to outweigh any contribution by older workers.

It’s also not clear whether these retirees are actually up to the task of doing the work when it comes to skill and ability. Some may be engineers or former nuclear workers, but they are long out of practice and may not be familiar with newer instruments and procedures. In the years since retirement, vision, reflexes and hearing may have degraded. At this point it would be a burden to do all the retesting and retraining that might be necessary to bring retirees back to work in this kind of setting, even if they had worked there in years past.

To be perfectly frank, someone who is not necessarily in the best of health or may have impaired vision, hearing, balance or reflexes can be downright dangerous in this kind of work environment.

So, therefore, to demonstrate that I don’t actually think there is any radiation danger to worry about, and I stress NOT because I feel brave or want to make any kind of self-sacrifice, I offer to go help with the cleanup.   Really, if they need people that bad, I’ll do it.   Granted, I don’t speak Japanese and don’t have any direct experience, but if they need someone to power wash pavement, lug around equipment, dig through debris or that kind of thing, fine, I’ll do it.  I’m not afraid – not even slightly.

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Since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world’s attention has been fixed upon the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The six reactor plant suffered major damage that disabled the primary cooling systems on units one, two, three and four.

Yet there is another Fukushima nuclear plant, which was struck by exactly the same forces but has gone largely unnoticed, primarily because there have been so few problems. Fukushima Daiichi translates directly as “Fukushima Number 1,” and was built starting in 1967. In 1976 it was decided to construct a second nuclear power plant, Fukushima Daini, directly translated as “Fukushima Number 2.” The first units came online at Fukushima Daini in 1982, with a total of four reactors being built, the last coming online in 1986.

Both nuclear plants are located directly on the coast. Fukushima Daini is about seven miles south of Fukushima Daiichi. Both plants also have very similar breakwater designs.

Fukushima Daini is also where a worker took these amazing pictures of the tsunami surge flooding the area around the reactor containment buildings. The water actually came in even higher than these pictures show, but the worker didn’t stick around to take any more photos.

Fukushima Daini is also where the first death at a nuclear plant as a result of the tsunami was reported.  A worker was trapped in the control booth of a crane at the plant’s exhaust stack by the inundation of water.  Rescuers reached the worker several minutes later but found he was already dead.

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For the full story or if your browser does not support embedded video, click here.

So there you have it.   Give some security guards radiation detectors and when radiation is detected PANIC!  A level 3 Hazmat situation, specially equipped fire department personnel brought in and the source now transferred to a “licensed contractor” to be disposed of, presumably at astronomical cost, because that’s how it usually goes with licensed contractors.

It is a wonder that these kind of scares do not happen more often.  Considering how radiophobic the public and officials (who should know better) tend to be and the fact that more and more radiation detectors are being put out there in the name of “keeping us safe from terrorists.”   The reality is that the likelihood that ionizing radiation from a terror device or any other source would actually pose an acute danger is extremely remote.  At the same time, there are many natural and man made sources of radiation in the world that can trigger false alarms.  Radiation meters really can’t tell the difference between a large amount of radioactive material that is well shielded versus one that is small but unshielded.

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Things have been stabilizing at the Fukushima nuclear plant, where reactor decay heat continues to drop and iodine-131 levels are now only a tiny fraction of what they were when the quake and tsunami hit on March 11. Unfortunately, not all the news has been good, however. A TEPCO worker has apparently died at the plant, the first death to have occurred after the initial disaster that struck the Japanese reactors.

Via WSBT:

worker at Japan’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant died on Saturday, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said, bringing the death toll at the complex to three since a massive earthquake and tsunami in March.

Despite the prolonged nuclear crisis, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is set to announce at a G8 summit in France that Japan will keep using nuclear power, the Yomiuri newspaper said.

The cause of the worker’s death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric’s contractors and started working at the plant on Friday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation on Saturday, Tokyo Electric said.

The Japanese government’s maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.

The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday (5 p.m. EDT on Friday) and brought to the plant’s medical room unconscious. He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said

There will likely be a lot of claims about how the worker died from radiation poisoning or the horrible conditions at the nuclear plant, but .17 millisieverts is not even 1% of the radiation dose that would be required to actually make a person fall ill, much less kill them.

More information has since come out indicating that the worker actually suffered a fatal heart attack.
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Every once in a while you read something that is not just wrong, but wronger than wrong, in fact, it’s not even wrong.   Sometimes it’s so much worse than wrong it either makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it or cry at the knowledge that people actually can believe it.

This is one of those cases.

From the Site “Hawaii Health Guide”:

Big Island Dairy Farmers fight radiation with Boron
An open letter from dairy farmers on the Big Island of Hawaii shares some solutions for working with radiation problems in milk.

Dear Milk Share Members,
Our goal to offer high quality safe food to our community has recently been challenged in the reality of the radioactivity being released into our environment. In the past weeks radioactive levels have increased in Hawaii, with high spikes and a more current leveling off of radiation levels. Milk from the large dairies in Hamakua and Hawi has shown elevated levels of radiation, from 400 to 2400 times the recognized safe levels.

Why is milk contamination significant in the world of agriculture? Because milk represents the overall condition of the entire food chain, since cows consume grass and are exposed to the same elements as crops. So, when milk tests positive for radiation, it indicates the entire food chain is contaminated since cows eat grass. When grass is contaminated everything grown in the same soil is contaminated. This has proposed a serious concern to us farmers, with us asking what can we do? After much consideration, research, and conversations with much appreciated experts in the field of biological farming and human & animal health, we have found some things which we are able to do to protect our soil, animals, and bodies.

But wait. It gets better. Here comes the best (or worst) part…

Aside from the much recognized supplement potassium iodine as a protection against radioactive iodine, there are a number of ways we can help. We have remembered our friend, elemental boron and the position it plays on the earth. Boron is the only mineral capable of accepting and ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell. Spoken simply, boron can take radiation and release it without upsetting its own very delicate balance.

WTF? Accepting ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell?

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